Some on the Left Now Criticize the Students They Created

(Photo: Frantisek Chmura/Dreamstime) After a half-century of hateful rhetoric about conservatives, liberals shouldn’t be surprised when students treat Charles Murray like a mortal enemy.

In the last few weeks, there has been a spate of columns by writers on the left condemning the left-wing college students who riot, take over university buildings, and shout down speakers they differ with.

These condemnations, coming about 50 years too late, should not be taken seriously.

Take New York Times columnist Frank Bruni. His latest column is filled with dismay over the way Middlebury College students attacked Charles Murray and the liberal female professor who invited him to Middlebury (she was injured by the rioters).

Advertisement

I have no doubt that Bruni is sincere. Sincerity, however, is completely unrelated to wisdom or insight.

Here’s the problem: It is the Left that transformed universities into the moral and intellectual wastelands most now are.

It is the Left that created the moral monsters known as left-wing students who do not believe in free speech, let alone tolerance.

It is the Left that has taught generations of young Americans that America is essentially a despicable society, racist and xenophobic to its core.

It is the Left that came up with the lie that the university has been overrun by a “culture of rape.”

It is the Left that taught generations of Americans that everyone on the right is sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, racist, and bigoted.

It is the Left that is anti-intellectual, teaching students to substitute feelings for reason.

It is the Left that removed the portrait of Shakespeare hanging at the English department of the University of Pennsylvania because Shakespeare is a white male — thereby teaching college students that art is not measured by excellence or by the pursuit of truth but by race, gender, and class.

It is the Left that has transformed the Founders of the United States from great men creating the freest and most affluent society in human society into rich, white, racist males who created a racist, colonialist, imperialist, women-hating, foreigner-hating, non-white-hating society.

Two of Frank Bruni’s fellow New York Times columnists — Paul Krugman and Charles Blow — vie with one another to write hate-filled hysteria regarding conservatives, Republicans, and the president. What are students who reads Blow supposed to conclude when Blow declares President Donald Trump “madman of the year,” “a parasite,” and a “demi-fascist,” and writes that the battle against Trump is “about democracy and fascism, war and peace, life and death”? Can we expect them to conclude that they should be respectful of conservatives who come to campus?

What are students supposed to conclude when a New York Times columnist declares President Trump ‘madman of the year,’ ‘a parasite,’ and a ‘​demi-fascist’?

How are students who read Krugman supposed to react to Republicans coming to their campus? On the very day in January 2011 that Jared Loughner murdered six people and gravely wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Ariz., Krugman wrote that the murders were a result of hate-filled rhetoric coming from conservatives and Republicans:

“When you heard the terrible news from Arizona, were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen? Put me in the latter category. . . . It’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves — with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence. Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: It’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right.”

Why would students want to allow people who engage in “eliminationist rhetoric” to speak on their campus?

And what about all the leftists who routinely use the word “resistance,” a word connoting a battle against Nazi-like tyranny, instead of the usual word, “opposition,” to denote political disagreement? What should students conclude about that? Isn’t rioting a legitimate form of “resistance” when a representative of “tyranny” comes to campus?

To cite but one more example, if students believe the left-wing hate group, the Southern Poverty Law Center, when it labels Ayaan Hirsi Ali an “anti-Islamic extremist,” is it any wonder that they and their professors at Brandeis University would rescind the university’s invitation to this courageous Somali-American woman, the great defender of women in the Islamic world?

After this half-century of left-wing teaching and hateful rhetoric, the tears of the Frank Brunis and others on the left mean nothing. Their leftist thinking spawned this catastrophe. Until they take responsibility for it, they are not to be taken seriously.

Most Popular

In his Lawfare critique of one of my several columns about the purported obstruction case against President Trump, Gabriel Schoenfeld loses me — as I suspect he will lose others — when he says of himself, “I do not think I am Trump-deranged.” Gabe graciously expresses fondness for me, and the feeling is ...
Read More

Are children innocents or are they leaders?
Are teenagers fully autonomous decision-makers, or are they lumps of mental clay, still being molded by unfolding brain development?
The Left seems to have a particularly hard time deciding these days. Take, for example, the high-school students from Parkland, ...
Read More

We live in a society in which gratuitous violence is the trademark of video games, movies, and popular music. Kill this, shoot that in repugnant detail becomes a race to the visual and spoken bottom.
We have gone from Sam Peckinpah’s realistic portrayal of violent death to a gory ritual of metal ripping ...
Read More

Mitt’s back. The former governor of Massachusetts and occasional native son of Michigan has a new persona: Mr. Utah. He’s going to bring Utah conservatism to the whole Republican party and to the country at large. Wholesome, efficient, industrious, faithful. “Utah has a lot to teach the politicians in ...
Read More

The horrifying school massacre in Parkland, Fla., has prompted another national debate about guns. Unfortunately, it seems that these conversations are never terribly constructive — they are too often dominated by screeching extremists on both sides of the aisle and armchair pundits who offer sweeping opinions ...
Read More

Howard Finkelstein, the Broward County public defender whose office is representing Nikolas Cruz, the suspect in the mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., puts it bluntly:
This kid exhibited every single known red flag, from killing animals to having a cache of weapons to disruptive behavior to saying he wanted to be ...
Read More

American government is supposed to look and sound like George Washington. What it actually looks and sounds like is Henry Hill from Goodfellas: bad suit, hand out, intoning the eternal mantra: “F*** you, pay me.”
American government mostly works by interposition, standing between us, the free people at ...
Read More

To understand the American gun-control debate, you have to understand the fundamentally different starting positions of the two sides. Among conservatives, there is the broad belief that the right to own a weapon for self-defense is every bit as inherent and unalienable as the right to speak freely or practice ...
Read More

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) first infantilizes its audience, then banalizes it, and, finally, controls it through marketing.
This commercial strategy, geared toward adolescents of all ages, resembles the Democratic party’s political manipulation of black Americans, targeting that audience through its ...
Read More